Shabbat Sermon: Shabbat Vayigash

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 28 December 2020

Watching Casablanca one afternoon earlier this week confirmed my opinion that it is one of the greatest movies of all time – and I will brook absolutely no opposition to that view. Among many memorable moments is when, almost at the end, Humphrey Bogart shoots Conrad Veidt, the SS officer. Claude Rains, the French police chief, tells his men to round up ‘the usual suspects.’ That phrase is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to “people habitually arrested as scapegoats rather than plausible perpetrators.” But not many people know that it entered everyday parlance from the script of Casablanca.

Hundreds of Biblical phrases pepper the English language, of course, courtesy of the King James Bible: apple of my eye, vanity of vanity, nothing new under the sun, forbidden fruit, scapegoat, we do not live by bread alone, for everything there is a season and so on.

And we had another one in this morning’s Torah reading. Not, perhaps, as well-known as those I’ve just quoted, but with its own resonance, nevertheless.

We’re near the end of the Joseph saga. He has revealed himself to his brothers; Jacob can now be told that his beloved son Joseph is alive. In the section Edward read, Joseph presents Jacob to Pharaoh, who asks him, “How old are you?” (Gen 47:8) Jacob answers: “130 years old.” He then says, m’at v’raim, “few and evil have been the years of my life.” In English we might expect a conjunction – something like: “130 and few and evil…” or “130 but few and evil….” In Hebrew there’s nothing. But either way it’s an interesting answer: both quantitative – “130 years” – and qualitative: “few and evil…” And it’s that m’at v’raim. which I find intriguing.

In Pharaoh’s eyes, Jacob is, surely, merely the patriarch of a small nomadic tribe. So is Jacob just being appropriately self-deprecating before the most powerful man in the world or is this somehow a moment of self-revelation for him, in which those two words, m’at v’raim, “few and evil,” speak volumes about what his life has been like?

For it hasn’t been an easy one. Years of exile from his beloved mother and his blind father, because of tricking Esau out of the paternal blessing. Himself tricked into marrying Leah and then having to work more years to get Rachel. Now, blessed with wives, children and material wealth, he has aroused the jealousy of Laban’s sons, and is forced to flee. He has that night encounter which leaves him disabled but with a new name. His path and Esau’s are about to cross and he doesn’t know if Esau still harbours murderous thoughts about him. He survives that meeting. Back in Canaan, his daughter is raped and two of his sons threaten revenge. Forced to move on, his wife Rachel dies in childbirth and is buried at the side of the road, not even in the family plot. His favourite son Joseph disappears. In old age his son Simeon is held hostage in Egypt and his youngest son Benjamin is ordered to be brought before the second most powerful man in Egypt.. And finally the son he thought had been torn apart by wild beasts turns out to be that same man.

But finally now the family is together – albeit in Egypt, not in Canaan. Jacob must be hoping that his final years, at least, can be lived out in peace and tranquillity. But he must still have some troubling thoughts: “my sons deceived me about what happened to Joseph. Is that the quid pro quo for me having deceived my father and my brother?” Nor does the narrative tell us how the brothers explained to Jacob that Joseph hadn’t been torn apart by wild beasts nor do we know what Joseph tells his father about what really happened.

It’s only when we stop and reflect on his journey that we see how hard Jacob’s life has actually been. That’s the cleverness of the whole Jacob/Joseph saga in the Torah: it never comes down completely on one side or the other, it never suggests firm answers to difficult questions. It doesn’t resolve the issues but leaves them hanging. Nor is there even a fairy-tale “they all lived happily ever after” ending. Next week we finish Genesis and will see how the brothers were afraid that Joseph might just have been waiting for Jacob to die before taking his revenge. And in two weeks, just seven verses into Exodus, we learn that “a new ruler arose in Egypt who knew not Joseph” and so begins the enslavement of our people.

When Jacob was about to meet Esau again, the Torah says he was “greatly frightened” (Gen 32:8.) Surprised, perhaps, that Jacob should have been afraid, midrash uses a striking phrase to try to understand his fear. It says, Ein havtachah la’tsaddik ba’olam hazeh (Bereshit Rabbah 76:2) “There are no promises for the righteous in this world.” What a mature statement for a religious system to say! We might expect such a system to say, simplistically, “trust in God and you have nothing to fear.” And if Jacob was at all reflective, he must have had questions about his righteousness: he had done some pretty unrighteous things to his brother and to his father in his younger days. Maybe all his subsequent trials and tribulations have been some sort of punishment for that?

And righteousness is clearly no guarantee of an easy life. If the link between doing good and the good life were that direct, one would have to be pretty stupid not to do good. Harold Kushner quipped that, when a bull is charging you, it’s no good shouting “But I’m a vegetarian!” But absolutely seriously, if the connection between righteousness and a good life were real, it would mean, for example, that all those who have died of Covid19 this year somehow deserved to die because of their unrighteous behaviour – and such a claim would, of course, be more than obscene.

There’s an inbuilt irony to the human condition. Joseph’s brothers thought that selling him into Egypt would put paid to his dreams once and for all. Yet of course it set in motion a train of events that would ultimately make those dreams come true. “We plan – God laughs.” For irony sits on that borderline between tragedy and comedy. It lives in the gap between what is and what ought to be. Faith can laugh because God’s world is both splendid and ridiculous – just as we human beings are both splendid and ridiculous. The danger lies when we lost sight of one or other of those elements of our makeup. Faith is that ability to live with both. “We must imagine,” says Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Pzhysha, “that we have two pockets. In our right pocket are the words ‘for my sake was the world created,’ and in our left, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’”

Faith laughs at those who take their splendour too seriously. Serious faith knows that Ein havtachah la’tsaddik ba’olam hazeh “there are no promises for the righteous in this world.” Yet faith also says that life is full of the potential richness of meaning. Faith asks us to look at our lives through the lens of those words of Jacob: m’at v’raim “few and evil.” In a year that has been so unrelentingly depressing that might be our prevailing thought: Coronavirus and all its expected and unexpected consequences, Brexit, incompetent government, an unstable POTUS, extremism and populism on the increase. Tempting indeed to see it all as m’at v’raim. And of course those things cannot be denied.

Yet at the same time, this year has also seen some great acts of care, selflessness, just straight righteousness. “Faith,” in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, “comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence….. Faith means to hold small things great, to take light matters seriously, to distinguish the common and the passing from the aspect of that which is lasting and endures.” But it doesn’t come easy. Jacob’s name was changed to Israel because he had struggled with God and with human beings and prevailed (Gen 32:29) Maybe including m’at v’raim in his answer to Pharaoh was his recognition of that ongoing struggle. The journey of Jacob-Israel, our journey, is, thankfully, an immense one.